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Living on hope By Every year we live on the edge of hope. The government tells us the future looks great. When that future arrives, nothing happens. Hope evaporates. It's a yearly game the government likes to play. The people of Nigeria must be weary of unfulfilled promises. These are not the times for political tricks.
This week President Olusegun Obasanjo demonstrated again that he is indeed out of touch with events in the country he has been governing for the past two years. He is the only leader in the developing and developed world whose vision of an optimistic future defies world economic forecasts. His assessment of Nigeria's performance in the past 41 years of independence was poor and mostly vague. He pitched his evaluation of Nigeria's performance on hope and prayers. Nigerians, he implied, must learn to live on hope because hope never dies. Obasanjo forgot that great nations of the world were never built on hope but on concrete, verifiable accomplishments. It is indeed a measure of the degree of lack of vision of Nigeria's leaders that a president should tell the nation in a national broadcast that one of the key achievements of the country was the fact that the nation was still in tact. This is a regurgitation of last year's independence broadcast. How did Obasanjo use Nigeria's continued existence as a reason for us to celebrate? Hear him: "There are many countries that have not gone through half of what we went through but they did not survive." Keep in mind that he did not provide any examples of those countries. Obasanjo made a similar statement last year and he has reproduced the same message this year. Nigerians may be short of everything but certainly they are not afflicted with short memories.
Obasanjo listed as part of the great achievements of his administration the upward review of salaries and wages of civil servants, the upward review and prompt payment of pensions, as well as a reduction in human rights violations. He attributed the reduction in human rights violations to the Justice Chukwudifu Oputa panel. Nigerians no doubt will sneer at this list of achievements. The upward review of salaries and wages does not mean Nigerians are better off today than they were in the past decade or two. You cannot measure the salaries of workers without actually measuring the level of inflation and how much basic items people are able to buy with the exaggerated salaries and wages. Simple economics, and Obasanjo should be aware of this, explains that if you go shopping with trolleys of cash and return home with a paper bag half filled with goods, two things become obvious to you: the high inflation rate and the low purchasing power of your currency. These were the two weaknesses in Obasanjo's chest thumping assessment of his government. Nigerians expect better. Overall, the economic situation continues to deteriorate and the best way to measure the pulse of the economy is to interview business leaders and ordinary people on how the economy has affected them. The message that gets repeated is one of gloom, hopelessness and misdirection.
In his televised broadcast, Obasanjo spoke proudly about the curtailment in the level of human rights abuses in Nigeria since his government set up the Oputa panel. The president's definition of human rights is appalling. He was comparing apples with oranges. Human rights abuses are still taking place in Nigeria and in more violent forms. Every year, Nigerians are killed, persecuted and displaced in parts of the North because of their religious faith, ethnic origin and political affiliation. These are, without doubt, gross abuses of human rights. The recent riots in Jos represent one such example. These are the kinds of human rights abuses that Obasanjo has ignored since he was sworn to office. Perhaps Obasanjo has become accustomed to executive human rights abuses perpetrated mostly by military and political leaders. They constitute another form of human rights abuses but they are not the only types of human rights. It is not the status of an offender that defines a crime as a human rights abuse but the crime itself. Parents abuse the rights of their children. Husbands abuse the rights of their wives. Teachers also abuse the rights of their students. These are no less human rights abuses than the abuses committed by national leaders. It is therefore misleading and incorrect for Obasanjo to argue that the level of human rights abuses has fallen because of the Oputa panel.
Obasanjo was right when he claimed that Nigeria is now no longer perceived and treated as a pariah nation in the international community. But it is important to point out that it is not because of Obasanjo and it is not because of his endless overseas trips. The gross human rights abuses in the Babangida and Abacha regimes which culminated in the 1995 senseless killing of Ken Saro-Wiwa and his colleagues earned Nigeria world opprobrium and suspension from many international and intergovernmental organisations. The lifting of the sanctions on Nigeria and Nigeria's re-admission into the international organisations were not achieved because Obasanjo became our president. These actions were taken because Nigeria returned to constitutional democracy. The credit for the transformation of Nigeria's international image must go to Nigerians as a whole and in particular to the last military government that successfully organised the elections that Obasanjo won.
Nigeria's international image may have improved but what has continued to deteriorate is the way Nigerian citizens (or travelers with Nigerian passports) are treated overseas. Obasanjo claimed that all these are now history because his government has turned everything around overnight. That must be the greatest hyperbole of the 21st century. Nigerian citizens are still being harassed and ill treated in many foreign countries. The growing involvement of Nigerians in sharp business practices (the "419" fraud) and criminally reprehensible activities has made foreign security agencies and financial institutions, as well as immigration officers at airports to treat innocent Nigerians as criminals. Obasanjo's government has not achieved any success in this area.
There are many reasons why Obasanjo and his government should not celebrate. The standard of education has deteriorated and many students are finding that there is no value in education anymore. Universities and polytechnics are under-funded. Teachers are underpaid. There is also growing insecurity of life and property. People sleep at night with one eye open and their ears on full alert, waiting for the dreaded banging on the door by armed robbers. There has been an astronomical increase in the incidence of violent armed robbery since Obasanjo's government came into office two years ago. The government's response has been half-hearted and unimpressive. The police have not been able to meet the challenges of armed robbery. The law enforcement agents are underpaid and they are not well equipped to fight crime in the 21st century. The consequence is low morale among members of the police force. October 2001
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